New Report: What can I learn from Adthena’s Paid Search Benchmark 2018

Competitive intelligence has long been recognized as an important part of strategic decision making. As the famous 20th Century management consultant Peter Drucker put it: “What a business needs most for its decisions — especially its strategic ones — is data about what goes on outside it. Only outside a business are there results, opportunities and threats.”

We looked, for example, at the share of clicks that was being driven by ad spend across eight major categories:

There are a few things we can discern from such benchmarks. We can see for example:

that Finance and Automotive are the two kinds of advertisers that spend more than the industry average ad spend on mobile (43.17% and 4.62%).

that a large volume of clicks in Travel (48.6%) is being driven by relatively less adspend (35.28%).

Covering the three major territories of US, UK, and Australia, we also dived deeper into the data to see how the cost of visibility varied by CPC:

Our CPC benchmarks revealed that Finance and Gaming are the two stand out industries in terms of the cost they can expect to pay per click. In the latter case, advertisers can expect to pay up to 484% more than the search average on mobile generics!

What can I learn from this benchmark?

This benchmark is a big-data study of over a hundred thousand advertisers (in total, it encompasses data from 140 million paid search ads, 135,000 advertisers, and 5.6 million search terms).

For advertisers, benchmarking enables comparison of individual performance against competitor industry, or category averages. For senior decision makers in digital, this intelligence can be used to refine, iterate, and optimize search campaigns.